(a) Technical Field
The present disclosure relates to a liquid crystal display.
(b) Discussion of the Related Art
A liquid crystal display (LCD), which is one of the flat panel display apparatuses that is being most widely used, includes two panels having electric field generating electrodes, such as pixel electrodes, and a common electrode and a liquid crystal layer interposed between the two panels.
The LCD displays an image by applying a voltage to the electric field generating electrodes to generate an electric field in the liquid crystal layer and by determining alignment of the liquid crystal molecules in the liquid crystal layer to control the polarization of incident light.
The LCD includes switching devices and a plurality of signal lines, such as gate and data lines, for controlling the switching devices connected to pixel electrodes to apply voltages to the pixels.
The gate lines transmit gate signals generated by a gate driver circuit, and the data lines transmit data voltages generated by a data driver circuit. The switching devices transmit the data voltages to the pixel electrodes according to the gate signals.
The gate and data driver circuits are directly mounted on the panels in the form of integrated chips. Otherwise, the gate and data driver circuits can be mounted on flexible printed circuit films that are attached to the panels. The integrated circuit chips are responsible for a large portion of production costs of the liquid crystal display.
More specifically, since the data driver integrated chips are much more expensive than the gate driver integrated chips, there is a need to reduce the number of data driver integrated chips for a high-resolution, large-sized liquid crystal display.
When the gate driver circuits together with gate lines, data lines, and switching devices are integrated into the panels, the production costs can be reduced. Since the structure of the data driver circuits is relatively complicated, however, the data circuits are not easy to integrate into the panels, so that there is a need to greatly reduce the number of data driver circuits.
The above information disclosed in this Background section is only for enhancement of an understanding of the background of the invention and, therefore, it may contain information that does not form the prior art that is already known in this country to a person of ordinary skill in the art.